COVID boomerang

When almost everybody thought COVID was over, it has hit us back with a “boomerang” of variants. COVID belongs to a family of “naughty” corona (“cold and flu”) viruses characterised by “haphazard” replication resulting in random mutations (evolution at work – not precisely determined “creation”). This enables them to re-infect us, even after vaccination, particularly so when the mutations have increased their infectivity.

Several months ago, the UK health service noted that a significant proportion of hospitalised COVID patients were left with some permanent damage to heart, lungs or kidneys and that many patients with “long COVID” chronic fatigue and “brain fog” had laboratory evidence of inflammatory brain damage.

COVID waves would have been three times more deadly without vaccination. Photo: Matthew Mirabelli

The elderly and other susceptible individuals (includes the obese and diabetics) are more at risk. A big US study just published shows re-infection increases this risk of permanent organ damage even further. COVID infection is no pussycat and well worth avoiding.

You might question the point of vaccination when you could still be infected. London’s Imperial College calculates that the COVID Delta and Omicron waves would have been three times more deadly without vaccination and that it saved around 20 million lives globally in the first year of the pandemic alone. Full COVID vaccination remains highly recommendable, particularly in the elderly and susceptible and we’ll have more of it this autumn/winter.

The inventions of vaccination and antibiotics resulted in the world’s population huge increase in a relatively short time and is one of modern medicine’s incredible achievements. Sadly, some are anti-vaccination with almost fanatical religious-type fervour, including some doctors, a few of whom have been sued in the US for allegedly spreading vaccine misinformation on social media.

The COVID “boomerang” means all indoor locations (and public transport) without ventilation are again infective traps and the general lack of mask wearing is foolhardy rather than macho.

Albert Cilia-Vincenti, former European Medicines Agency scientific delegate – Attard

More equal than others

The Jesuit Refugee Service and Aditus Foundation are working hard to support refugees and asylum seekers here in Malta (July 12).

However, they seem to have little or no concern for those who have been granted residence here on the basis of fully complete paperwork relating to identity, past employment and fully paid-up tax and social security status in their country of origin and who pay income tax here.

Will the JRS and Aditus Foundation give their support to allowing foreign nationals with resident status to vote in Maltese elections too? Or would that be just too risky?

Alan Cooke – Sliema

Culture of care

In our daily speech, we use the phrase: take care of yourself. And we do well. But our society at large needs care, otherwise what would be its fate?

If care is the buzzword of today’s general well-being, why can’t we care for unborn babies too? Do we really care if we, to use Archbishop Charles Scicluna’s phrase from a recent homily given at the Monastery of St Scholastica, in Vittoriosa, “put these people in a freezer or kill them”?

Where is really our care, the care of the Good Samaritan?

Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap – Marsa